Abstract

This paper offers a critical examination of Krishna’s role as a negotiator in the Mahabharata, often bringing admiration from people. While Krishna’s diplomatic mission to Hastinapura demonstrates his persuasion skills, strategic decision making and communication skills. However, despite excelling at negotiations he still couldn’t bring resolve the issue between the parties. We can further reduce this failure to structural, psychological, and political limitation on peace-making. Further with reference from various sources like Machiavellian political realism, Greek mythologies, psychological theories of aggression, international legal history, and Russian literary philosophy, the paper argues that existence of conflict or rather war isn’t merely due to poor negotiation but because human beings repeatedly prefer power, identity, and emotional certainty over compromise. This paper not only explores Krishna’s negotiation skills, this paper further tries to understand what more could have been done, while acknowledging that even the most skilled negotiators may fail in the face of human preferences.